Why didn't he ask for the information how to get a complaint form over the telephone? No doubt, if the police were prone to intimidation (and of course they would be) they'd tell him he'd have to come into a station... at which point, he should go to the station... with his lawyer.
Because he doesn't have to? Because, legally, they have no right to do anything other than hand over the form?
And who the hell has a lawyer on retainer to go take a trip down to the Police Dept with them and pick up a police form? I would argue that the number of people that can afford a lawyer is inversely proportional to the number of people that would need a fucking complaint form in the first place. You think the cops play their intimidation, hard-ass tactics with educated people that have the means to defend themselves and actually fight the police department? Of course not. The cops aren't stupid.
It simply boggles the mind that so many people think that we should just do what they want to save us a hassle. That's exactly why they give you a fucking hassle in the first place: to get you to do whatever it is that they want. If they had the legal right to compel you to do this shit, they would have already invoked it. If they had probable cause to suspect a person of anything, said probable cause would have existed before asking for the complaint form. Simply asking for a complaint form is not probable cause of anything, and legally, without probable cause, you don't even have to give your fucking name.
It's called dumping, and the whole point is to completely control a market (or control a large portion of it). It's a long-term strategy, meant to pay off down the road.
Perfect example is the TV industry. For many years, the U.S. was the main manufacturer of TVs worldwide, but then foreign competitors began dumping their own TVs on the market, selling them below cost, and now, there are no more U.S. TV manufacturers. They've completely killed the industry in the U.S..
In addition, the response "I prefer not to tell you" could in itself be used as probable cause for them to force you to give this information. Staring at them blankly gives them what? "I didn't like the way he was looking at me"?
Regardless of how it will "end", we have a right to refuse to speak. That is guaranteed by decades of case law. Just because they don't like it or it makes their job harder, that still does not give them the right to react the way they did to it.
You have the right to stare at them blankly and keep your mouth closed no matter what. Regardless of what impression that gives the police, that is a right that everyone in this country has. They cannot compel you to speak until you are standing in front of a judge, having already been sworn in before the court, and even then, there are restrictions on what exactly they can compel you to say.
Walking into a police station and saying "I want a complaint form" only has one legal response: Producing said fucking form. The end. Everything else is nothing more than police trying to cover their ass and the asses of others in their department. They are not in charge of an investigation against a police officer. They're the fucking desk clerk, for fuck's sake. It's not like they have I.A. supervisors handling the desks now, obviously. Given that assumption, I think it's clear why they want all this information up front. Only a real idiot would think that their motives were not entirely selfish, because there simply is no other reasonable motive.
Wrap your mind around this: What if the officer you wish to file a report on is manning the fucking desk? Can you not see how everything they're doing outside of handing over the form is possibly obstructing the ability of a citizen to file an anonymous complaint?
Despite what you may think, we still have the right to anonymity in this country, even when we're asking for a complaint form. Honestly, I'm not interested in playing their fucking game, and I don't legally have to, so fuck them and their questions. Do you not see how simply "playing along" does just as much to erode your rights as condoning this shit in the first place?
They're not supposed to have to give any of that information at all. Any citizen in this country should be able to walk into any police station in this country and get a complaint form upon request. All the bullshit "questions" being asked as a barrier to entry is nothing more than the cop trying to get some information so they can cover both their own asses and the asses of anyone potentially involved in the report.
Why do you think they want their name so bad? Just so they have it? Get fucking real. This is the police department we're talking about, not Pizza Hut. They want the person's name so they can go pull their file, see the names of any officers they may have had contact with, and start playing their coverup games. The first thing they would do is contact every officer in that file and tell them "PSSSSS Just so you know John Doe is in here asking for a complaint form" and then all of a sudden documents, reports, evidence goes "missing" and VOILA! No more complaint, it's just someone trying to "get free money from the police department". That's precisely what the one guy even says: "I need to make sure it's legitimate." Who the fuck put him in charge of investigating a report? Does Internal Affairs watch the fucking front desk now at a police station? Please...
No matter how angry they get at you, no matter how much the bluster and bitch, no matter how much they try to beg, plead, and cajole you, the fact remains that you do not have to tell them a fucking thing, not even your name. Asking for a complaint form is within the legal rights of every citizen in this country, no questions asked.
This is pretty much all the answer anyone needs right here. The reason why things like this become memes in the first place is because it's invariably true. Even good people, that swear they're going to be "different" when they break into management, often find themselves broken down by the machine and become no different than the other PHBs before too long.
It's really no different than politics, really. Everyone has lofty goals when they get into politics, but after a few years, they're playing the back-scratching games and getting involved in the under-handed bullshit, too, just like everyone else. Show me a modern day Cato, or Cincinnatus, that is able to achieve any real sort of power and I do believe I may soil myself.
What do you do when the answer is "YOU'RE RESISTING ARREST!!!" and they beat the shit out of you, taze you, then 'lose your phone down the sewer in the struggle'?
And don't count on any dashcam footage to help you. Here's an example where nine independent dashcams mysteriously "failed" to record an incident where a reporter, who was coincidentally (of course it's just a coincidence, am I right?) covering a series of corruption scandals within the local government, was pulled out of her car by a dozen officers, along with her cameraman, and roughed up on the side of the road.
Here's a nice passage:
Although I was the first journalist in the United States known to be subjected to a felony traffic stop while on the job, some officers said I was "lucky it wasn't a real one." Had it been, they claimed, I would have been "eating the pavement." One police official told Washingtonian magazine, "McCarren should quit her whining. She wasn't shot."
Oh, bullshit. I'll admit that there are a handful of decent politicians out there, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon comes to mind, but the vast majority of them are sneaky, insider-trading fuckheads more concerned with their own gain than anyone else's.
Many may start out with the intention of doing good, but by the time they've hit the national stage, many of them have already sold out so many times they wouldn't even recognize their former selves.
Show me the politicians that would support capping (or God forbid LOWERING) their ridiculous salaries, or moving towards benefits packages similar to those that most Americans have access to, or supporting anything at all that would potentially limit their power or their ability to pad their bank accounts and I do believe I may have a heart attack...
That's because the Dems have moved to the center in an attempt to please everybody (thus really pleasing nobody) while the right has moved waaaaaaaaay to the right and plays on fear, uncertainty, and doubt with all the "they took 'er jobs!/God said Adam and Eve!/Islam is a religion based in evil!" troglodytes.
There is no party truly representing the left in our government anymore.
A lot of retailers are stuck on IE6...I think it has to do with the industry's absolute hatred of ever actually spending money on internal improvements until it's become a ridiculous liability.
I know from personal experience that CompUSA used IE6 before they crashed and burned, and Home Depot ran a lot of shit through it as well. At least at CompUSA the workstations weren't restricted from running other browser software, although we'd get bitched at about it from time to time when people would bypass the blocks and find ways to pull up pron on them...it was always a joy bringing a customer over to the workstation to show them the technical specs on a laptop to be greeted by a big old pair of titties when I opened FF.
Goddamn right. A terrorist or pedophile only has a few methods at his disposal to fuck us, but lawyers and corporations spend billions finding new and clever ways to collectively fuck us without us even knowing it every single day.
Same here. That's why I've always had a hard time swallowing the whole "Western Digital drives are crap" meme. If I had to choose a brand as a "crap", it would be Maxtor...I literally had a 0% survival rate beyond 3 years with one of their drives.
Western Digital drives, on the other hand, I've had nothing but good results with. My dad is still using both a 7.9 GB and a 13.1 GB Western Digital drive he bought pre-2000 in his Windows 98SE legacy machine (which I think only recognized up to 32 GB drives or something), and I've got a handful of working, but too small to be practical, WD drives in my workbench in the garage as we speak...just haven't decided what the hell I want to do with them, as there isn't much use for sub-100 GB hard drives these days obviously.
I honestly know it's all anecdotal, and opinions are like assholes, but honestly the only place I've ever heard Western Digital being considered shitty is here on/..
Popular is subjective, and ever changing. Take dubstep, for instance...whether you personally care for the music or not (I don't) it's becoming hugely popular, and dubstep was distributed mainly through torrents and other file-sharing services that the RIAA actively has been trying to kill off. If not for those avenues of distribution, it would not be as popular as it is today.
The RIAA isn't stupid...they know full well that there is a lot of legitimate music and other media being traded via torrents (even outside of indie artists there is a lot of fair use music and other media being shared) and they are just as eager to kill that off, if not more so, then the piracy. Their bullshit business model depends on there being no alternative; I mean, honestly, if not for Napster, we'd all still be fucking buying CDs...
Myspace launched in 2003, was bought by News Corporation in 2005 for $580 million, was totally irrelevant by 2008, and was sold again in 2011 to Justin Timberlake for only $35 million.
It seems to me that Google is a huge exception to an otherwise pretty bankable rule.
Yes, you're exactly right. It happens at my office, too. We have so many hotspots nearby that I have gotten a stability boost by telling it not to auto-change channels.
Same here. At any given moment there are literally 35+ wireless networks within range of my wireless devices, so many that the automatic channel-changing was degrading performance because 2/3 of the routers in the building chase each other across every channel all day long. I've actually fired up my wifi sniffing ap on my phone to show people out of pure amusement; watching it in real time is like watching some sort of competitive sport. It's not even just residential signals, either...there is a strip mall right behind my complex so I pick up half of their networks, as well.
In the end all I could do is hard-line everything in the apartment, despite how much of a pain in the ass it is to do that in an apartment where you can't drill holes in the walls. Everything that can't be hard-lined has to run via 3/4G, otherwise you're surfing at dial-up speeds.
There really needs to be some sort of standard method of channel negotiation the router manufacturers can come up with to prevent that kind of crap. I honestly don't know what else they're going to do, short of moving to entirely new bands constantly, but even doing that is only a temporary solution, as the 5 GHz band is just as cluttered as the 2.4 GHz band in this building. There is 100 units within a few hundred feet of each other here...
Hell, I'd bet a significant number of the profiles on there haven't even been accessed in months. As for false information, almost everyone I know has false information in their profile somewhere.
That's one reason why I think this whole IPO is going to crash and burn. Once shareholders start demanding the wringing of every piece of revenue out of the data they can, they're going to realize that a lot of the data is trash, which is going to affect the value of it, obviously. Then you're going to end up with Facebook doing retarded shit like Google's 'Real Name' policy to bolster their products value and alienate the user base even more, which is going to lead to even more abandoned accounts (because outright deleting them is a pain in the fucking ass) and bullshit lies.
Slashdot Mirror
Why didn't he ask for the information how to get a complaint form over the telephone? No doubt, if the police were prone to intimidation (and of course they would be) they'd tell him he'd have to come into a station... at which point, he should go to the station... with his lawyer.
Because he doesn't have to? Because, legally, they have no right to do anything other than hand over the form?
And who the hell has a lawyer on retainer to go take a trip down to the Police Dept with them and pick up a police form? I would argue that the number of people that can afford a lawyer is inversely proportional to the number of people that would need a fucking complaint form in the first place. You think the cops play their intimidation, hard-ass tactics with educated people that have the means to defend themselves and actually fight the police department? Of course not. The cops aren't stupid.
It simply boggles the mind that so many people think that we should just do what they want to save us a hassle. That's exactly why they give you a fucking hassle in the first place: to get you to do whatever it is that they want. If they had the legal right to compel you to do this shit, they would have already invoked it. If they had probable cause to suspect a person of anything, said probable cause would have existed before asking for the complaint form. Simply asking for a complaint form is not probable cause of anything, and legally, without probable cause, you don't even have to give your fucking name.
It's called dumping, and the whole point is to completely control a market (or control a large portion of it). It's a long-term strategy, meant to pay off down the road.
Perfect example is the TV industry. For many years, the U.S. was the main manufacturer of TVs worldwide, but then foreign competitors began dumping their own TVs on the market, selling them below cost, and now, there are no more U.S. TV manufacturers. They've completely killed the industry in the U.S..
In addition, the response "I prefer not to tell you" could in itself be used as probable cause for them to force you to give this information. Staring at them blankly gives them what? "I didn't like the way he was looking at me"?
Ignoring cops will never end well
Regardless of how it will "end", we have a right to refuse to speak. That is guaranteed by decades of case law. Just because they don't like it or it makes their job harder, that still does not give them the right to react the way they did to it.
You have the right to stare at them blankly and keep your mouth closed no matter what. Regardless of what impression that gives the police, that is a right that everyone in this country has. They cannot compel you to speak until you are standing in front of a judge, having already been sworn in before the court, and even then, there are restrictions on what exactly they can compel you to say.
Walking into a police station and saying "I want a complaint form" only has one legal response: Producing said fucking form. The end. Everything else is nothing more than police trying to cover their ass and the asses of others in their department. They are not in charge of an investigation against a police officer. They're the fucking desk clerk, for fuck's sake. It's not like they have I.A. supervisors handling the desks now, obviously. Given that assumption, I think it's clear why they want all this information up front. Only a real idiot would think that their motives were not entirely selfish, because there simply is no other reasonable motive.
Wrap your mind around this: What if the officer you wish to file a report on is manning the fucking desk? Can you not see how everything they're doing outside of handing over the form is possibly obstructing the ability of a citizen to file an anonymous complaint?
Despite what you may think, we still have the right to anonymity in this country, even when we're asking for a complaint form. Honestly, I'm not interested in playing their fucking game, and I don't legally have to, so fuck them and their questions. Do you not see how simply "playing along" does just as much to erode your rights as condoning this shit in the first place?
They're not supposed to have to give any of that information at all. Any citizen in this country should be able to walk into any police station in this country and get a complaint form upon request. All the bullshit "questions" being asked as a barrier to entry is nothing more than the cop trying to get some information so they can cover both their own asses and the asses of anyone potentially involved in the report.
Why do you think they want their name so bad? Just so they have it? Get fucking real. This is the police department we're talking about, not Pizza Hut. They want the person's name so they can go pull their file, see the names of any officers they may have had contact with, and start playing their coverup games. The first thing they would do is contact every officer in that file and tell them "PSSSSS Just so you know John Doe is in here asking for a complaint form" and then all of a sudden documents, reports, evidence goes "missing" and VOILA! No more complaint, it's just someone trying to "get free money from the police department". That's precisely what the one guy even says: "I need to make sure it's legitimate." Who the fuck put him in charge of investigating a report? Does Internal Affairs watch the fucking front desk now at a police station? Please...
No matter how angry they get at you, no matter how much the bluster and bitch, no matter how much they try to beg, plead, and cajole you, the fact remains that you do not have to tell them a fucking thing, not even your name. Asking for a complaint form is within the legal rights of every citizen in this country, no questions asked.
This is pretty much all the answer anyone needs right here. The reason why things like this become memes in the first place is because it's invariably true. Even good people, that swear they're going to be "different" when they break into management, often find themselves broken down by the machine and become no different than the other PHBs before too long.
It's really no different than politics, really. Everyone has lofty goals when they get into politics, but after a few years, they're playing the back-scratching games and getting involved in the under-handed bullshit, too, just like everyone else. Show me a modern day Cato, or Cincinnatus, that is able to achieve any real sort of power and I do believe I may soil myself.
What do you do when the answer is "YOU'RE RESISTING ARREST!!!" and they beat the shit out of you, taze you, then 'lose your phone down the sewer in the struggle'?
And don't count on any dashcam footage to help you. Here's an example where nine independent dashcams mysteriously "failed" to record an incident where a reporter, who was coincidentally (of course it's just a coincidence, am I right?) covering a series of corruption scandals within the local government, was pulled out of her car by a dozen officers, along with her cameraman, and roughed up on the side of the road.
Here's a nice passage:
Although I was the first journalist in the United States known to be subjected to a felony traffic stop while on the job, some officers said I was "lucky it wasn't a real one." Had it been, they claimed, I would have been "eating the pavement." One police official told Washingtonian magazine, "McCarren should quit her whining. She wasn't shot."
America! Fuck Yeah!!
When simply asking for a complaint form gets you arrested in police departments all over the country, I'd say his description is pretty accurate.
The Largest Street Gang in America
Oh, bullshit. I'll admit that there are a handful of decent politicians out there, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon comes to mind, but the vast majority of them are sneaky, insider-trading fuckheads more concerned with their own gain than anyone else's.
Many may start out with the intention of doing good, but by the time they've hit the national stage, many of them have already sold out so many times they wouldn't even recognize their former selves.
Show me the politicians that would support capping (or God forbid LOWERING) their ridiculous salaries, or moving towards benefits packages similar to those that most Americans have access to, or supporting anything at all that would potentially limit their power or their ability to pad their bank accounts and I do believe I may have a heart attack...
That's because the Dems have moved to the center in an attempt to please everybody (thus really pleasing nobody) while the right has moved waaaaaaaaay to the right and plays on fear, uncertainty, and doubt with all the "they took 'er jobs!/God said Adam and Eve!/Islam is a religion based in evil!" troglodytes.
There is no party truly representing the left in our government anymore.
As can the humongous retailers that are buying tens of thousands of licenses at a time...
A lot of retailers are stuck on IE6...I think it has to do with the industry's absolute hatred of ever actually spending money on internal improvements until it's become a ridiculous liability.
I know from personal experience that CompUSA used IE6 before they crashed and burned, and Home Depot ran a lot of shit through it as well. At least at CompUSA the workstations weren't restricted from running other browser software, although we'd get bitched at about it from time to time when people would bypass the blocks and find ways to pull up pron on them...it was always a joy bringing a customer over to the workstation to show them the technical specs on a laptop to be greeted by a big old pair of titties when I opened FF.
You take your goddamned liberal learnin' shit and get outta here! NASCAR is on goddamnit!
Goddamn right. A terrorist or pedophile only has a few methods at his disposal to fuck us, but lawyers and corporations spend billions finding new and clever ways to collectively fuck us without us even knowing it every single day.
Same here. That's why I've always had a hard time swallowing the whole "Western Digital drives are crap" meme. If I had to choose a brand as a "crap", it would be Maxtor...I literally had a 0% survival rate beyond 3 years with one of their drives.
Western Digital drives, on the other hand, I've had nothing but good results with. My dad is still using both a 7.9 GB and a 13.1 GB Western Digital drive he bought pre-2000 in his Windows 98SE legacy machine (which I think only recognized up to 32 GB drives or something), and I've got a handful of working, but too small to be practical, WD drives in my workbench in the garage as we speak...just haven't decided what the hell I want to do with them, as there isn't much use for sub-100 GB hard drives these days obviously.
I honestly know it's all anecdotal, and opinions are like assholes, but honestly the only place I've ever heard Western Digital being considered shitty is here on /..
+1 Informative.
I was always partial to the flood, though. It was just so fucking biblical.
Popular is subjective, and ever changing. Take dubstep, for instance...whether you personally care for the music or not (I don't) it's becoming hugely popular, and dubstep was distributed mainly through torrents and other file-sharing services that the RIAA actively has been trying to kill off. If not for those avenues of distribution, it would not be as popular as it is today.
The RIAA isn't stupid...they know full well that there is a lot of legitimate music and other media being traded via torrents (even outside of indie artists there is a lot of fair use music and other media being shared) and they are just as eager to kill that off, if not more so, then the piracy. Their bullshit business model depends on there being no alternative; I mean, honestly, if not for Napster, we'd all still be fucking buying CDs...
Until bittorrent is used by normal people for something legitimate,
It's been used by indie musicians to distribute their music for years now. That's certainly a "legitimate" use in my eyes.
Myspace launched in 2003, was bought by News Corporation in 2005 for $580 million, was totally irrelevant by 2008, and was sold again in 2011 to Justin Timberlake for only $35 million.
It seems to me that Google is a huge exception to an otherwise pretty bankable rule.
Yes, you're exactly right. It happens at my office, too. We have so many hotspots nearby that I have gotten a stability boost by telling it not to auto-change channels.
Same here. At any given moment there are literally 35+ wireless networks within range of my wireless devices, so many that the automatic channel-changing was degrading performance because 2/3 of the routers in the building chase each other across every channel all day long. I've actually fired up my wifi sniffing ap on my phone to show people out of pure amusement; watching it in real time is like watching some sort of competitive sport. It's not even just residential signals, either...there is a strip mall right behind my complex so I pick up half of their networks, as well.
In the end all I could do is hard-line everything in the apartment, despite how much of a pain in the ass it is to do that in an apartment where you can't drill holes in the walls. Everything that can't be hard-lined has to run via 3/4G, otherwise you're surfing at dial-up speeds.
There really needs to be some sort of standard method of channel negotiation the router manufacturers can come up with to prevent that kind of crap. I honestly don't know what else they're going to do, short of moving to entirely new bands constantly, but even doing that is only a temporary solution, as the 5 GHz band is just as cluttered as the 2.4 GHz band in this building. There is 100 units within a few hundred feet of each other here...
And for the love of God stay away from the big ball of radiation we call "the sun"!
How many houses have you lived in that were built out of concrete, Vault Dweller?
Hell, I'd bet a significant number of the profiles on there haven't even been accessed in months. As for false information, almost everyone I know has false information in their profile somewhere.
That's one reason why I think this whole IPO is going to crash and burn. Once shareholders start demanding the wringing of every piece of revenue out of the data they can, they're going to realize that a lot of the data is trash, which is going to affect the value of it, obviously. Then you're going to end up with Facebook doing retarded shit like Google's 'Real Name' policy to bolster their products value and alienate the user base even more, which is going to lead to even more abandoned accounts (because outright deleting them is a pain in the fucking ass) and bullshit lies.
Or else he mentioned his fucking car in an email once.
But no, you're right, they've probably got their agents infiltrating the DMV as we speak!!! OH NOES, THE GOOGLE SPIDERS!!!! AIEIEEEEEE!!!!!!!
The only shareholder that matters doesn't need maximized profits.
Since when in the history of the world has anyone turned down increased wealth because they didn't need it?
Did I cross over into the mirror universe this morning?